The present invention relates to vehicles for transporting goods, and in particular to vehicles for transporting shipping containers.
Vehicles and trucks of various kinds are widely available for transporting goods. Trucks for carrying large loads in enclosed containers are generally quite tall and, consequently, unstable. It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a vehicle for transporting goods presenting a relatively low, wide and stable configuration.
Further, it is known to load trucks by mounting a large shipping container on the truck. Shipping containers of this type can be transferred from one form of transportation to another without unloading or handling the goods contained therein. Thus a shipping container may be initially loaded, then placed on a truck, transferred to a railroad car, set on a ship, removed to another railroad car, and finally carried by another truck to a final destination, all without handling the goods loaded in the shipping container. Cranes or other apparatus have usually been necessary for transferring the containers from one transport to another. Such a container could not be easily unloaded from a truck, stored, and reloaded on the truck without additional lifting apparatus. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a vehicle that can pick up and set down a large shipping container without auxiliary mechanisms.
One form of vehicle for moving containers has a U-frame with rearwardly extending side frames or beams. Such vehicles are shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,556,365 to Niva and U.S. Pat. No. 5,879,122 to Voetzke. As explained by Niva, such trucks are driven backward to a container standing on the ground. The open end of the U-frame is moved backwards such that the U-frame will enclose the container on three sides. As mentioned in Niva and as described in Voetzke, a second inner U-frame is then lifted hydraulically to contact the container and lift it into a transport position. Niva seeks to eliminate the second inner lifting frame by providing specialized coupling for connecting hydraulic cylinders on the vehicle directly to specialized brackets on the container. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to provide a vehicle that can be easily driven around a relatively long container. In both Niva and Voetzke, for example, the containers shown are relatively more narrow near the ground and have a widened top to engage an inner U-frame or special hydraulic lifts while providing clearance near the ground for the first U-frame of the vehicles. Such a shape for the container is suitable for the refuse containers described in Voetzke or the mining containers described by Niva. Standardized shipping containers, by contrast, need a rectangular shape so that they can be stacked in ships, for example. It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a U-frame vehicle for moving containers with improved facility for placing the vehicle around a substantially rectangular shipping container.